Joe was an identical twin born to a Norwegian-German family of five siblings in North Dakota in the early 1940s. He and Jack created their own twin language when they were toddlers and learned English at a special speech school when they were five.
These handsome young men became fine students, high school wrestlers, and music education majors in college. When they were twenty, they worked as bellmen at Many Glacier Hotel in Montana and regaled hotel guests in the evenings with their Dixie-land Band, The Accidental Eight. During the magical, sunlit summer of 1963, Joe grew to love a blue-aproned housekeeping maid, Linda Warnock, from Illinois.
Joe and Linda married in 1965 and lived in Arizona, Montana, Oregon, and Kingston, Jamaica, where Joe taught instrumental music and Linda taught biology. He became an Equitable Life insurance agent in 1970 and worked in that profession until he retired in 2008.
Joe earned a Chartered Life Underwriter degree and served as president of both the Willamette Estate Planning Council and the Salem Noon Optimist Club. He played tenor saxophone with the Salem Concert Band and clarinet with the Salem Pops Orchestra.
He loved to hike, ski, read, collect Native American artifacts, have fun with his Siberian huskies and Siamese cats, ride his motorbike and travel across the U.S. and to the British Isles with Linda.
· Their son Aaron with wife Stephanie in Central Oregon, and their daughter Andrea in California, have become musicians, as well.
Memorial Services will take place in the spring at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Salem.